21st-Century Jobs

21st-Century Jobs keep families out of poverty and create higher incomes, driving Louisville’s economic prosperity. Our data call for increasing the proportion of residents engaged in technical and professional occupations and creating a more competitive community by increasing the share of workers employed in higher-value, higher-wage technical and professional jobs to 40%. Implicit in achieving this goal is providing skills and knowledge training for workers in lower-wage occupations, as well as retaining, growing, and attracting employers that provide professional and technical jobs.

21st-Century Workforce & TalentCurrent: 60% | Goal: 50%

Goal

Louisville’s economic development efforts need to focus on both jobs that keep families out of poverty and those that create higher incomes to drive economic prosperity. Using factors like high wage job attainment, unemployment, and affordable housing gives a meaningful perspective on the state of the job market and the ability for a community to provide meaningful avenues for financial independence. The main metric for 21st-century workforce and talent is median wage, adjusted for cost of living. Louisville has a target goal of being in the top 50% of its peers in median wage, adjusted for cost of living. Learn more about this metric.

Factors

Population in High Wage Occupations

Median Earnings

Job Creation Rate

Job Destruction Rate

Median Household Income

Unemployment

Income Inequality

Natural Breaks Algorithm

For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.

Z-Scores

Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).

Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.